Social Media

Social media serves to support relationships, thus it can be a great tool for Local Public Health Agencies (LPHAs) to engage with the populations they serve. For social media to be an effective tool, metrics must be gathered to determine whether target populations are being reached, and whether they are engaging with the content. While most social media platforms offer the option to download a variety of metrics, those metrics are not always useful, meaningful, or accurate. The Knowledge Management team at KFL&A Public Health have developed a data collection and storage system that incorporates only the useful elements generated by the social platforms themselves, supplemented with back-end development database analytics that fills in information gaps. The system can currently be used to generate three kinds of reports:

Facebook (Organic): a page from an LPHA, or collaborating partner where data is available

Twitter: regular and paid advertisements

Facebook and Instagram: paid advertisements

Our team was mindful of workflow in the construction of these reports. Included within them are over 30 infographics, representing the most pertinent metrics out of hundreds of possibilities. The reports are interactive, selecting any of the infographics reveals a pop-up dialogue box with more granular information such as a link to the original post. The aim of these reports is to empower other LPHAs to be able to clearly measure their own social media presences, and contribute to a greater body of knowledge about successful public health social media strategies. Below are two examples of infographics generated within a report done for a campaign at KFL&A Public Health.

The image below is a benchmark gauge, which shows the median rate for the campaign and time-period investigated in the coloured number and coloured bar. The values for the campaign are compared to median values for the rate across all campaigns in the database. The median click rate for this campaign was 9.6, with a benchmark of 5.0, meaning this campaign generated 4.6 more clicks per 1000 users reached than the average median for other campaigns used to generate the benchmark. Information like this can help project staff gauge whether their current social media strategy is performing as expected, and encourages further investigation about the strengths and weaknesses of different social media campaign strategies.

In the second image, a tree map shows the different coloured areas that represent the number of clicks per 1000 users reached in the categories: photo+link, link, photo, and status. Each box contains the first few words of the single post it represents, with the size being determined by the main metric of interest, in this case, reach. In this example, a photo+link whose text reads, “They’ve got your front. We’ve got your back. Our community supp…” had the most reach of all posts measured. The tree map also shows that a photo+link had the most reach for the four categories measured for this campaign.

If you are interested in learning more about what our team can do for your social media presence, please contact us.